How Jon Stewart Got Millennials To Care About The News

It's hard to believe Jon Stewart will no longer be the host of "The Daily Show."

For Millennials, especially, this truly is the end of an era.

We grew up Stewart. He helped us make sense of the world during some of the most formative events of our lives. Even though he's insisted he's not a journalist, we've trusted him more than any other source of news.

He ruthlessly exposed hypocrisy among politicians and the mainstream media, and made us laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Stewart encapsulated our cynical perception of America's political system and the news, and gave us hope even in the midst of chaos.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, when no one was really providing a proper response, Stewart offered one of the only truly genuine takes on the awful events of that day.

More recently, following the horrific shooting in Charleston, he delivered what was perhaps the most poignant and painfully accurate monologue of his career:

I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn't exist. And I'm confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won't do jack sh*t. Yeah. That's us.

Stewart has always had the courtesy to tell Millennials the truth while those in power attempted to whitewash reality and infantilize us.

Simply put, he got us to care about the news because he didn't feed us the same sh*t as everyone else.

During his final episode on Thursday, Stewart gave a powerful speech on this very subject, declaring, "b*llshit is everywhere."

His words were a perfectly apt summary of the way in which he's delivered the "fake news" for over a decade.

Stewart was essentially telling the world never to stop asking questions and to refuse to take anything at face value, particularly if it's presented to us by those in power.

View a transcript of the speech and watch it below:

My rough transcript of Jon Stewart's extraordinary "Bullshit is everywhere" speech. pic.twitter.com/guXBbIDD9g — Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) August 7, 2015

Thank you, Jon Stewart. We will miss you.

Citations: Many millennials are about to lose their most trusted news source Jon Stewart (Washington Post)